The current era is the digital era where customer experience in the world is being infused with technology. Today, we have systems that replace the sensors and cashiers in stores. We also have other locations to track where customers are walking, and smart mirrors that give the items you can try on. Today, one of the startups, HappyOrNot, is enhancing the user experience by announcing another funding round.
HappyOrNot uses hardware to know whether the customers are satisfied with a certain service or not. Today, the company has announced that it has raised $25 million in funding. The company would use this money to improve its technology. However, this money is way less than that raised by other startups, like Facetune.
Today, the customer satisfaction booths of the company are present in the 4000-strong list in 35 different countries. These include the San Francisco 49ers, Heathrow Airport, McDonald’s and hospitals in different countries. Until today, HappyOrNot has 1.3 billion responses from customers. The customer response offered is also more than the basic responses, “Yes, I am happy” or “No, I am sad right now.”
When it last raised money in 2017, the company had raised $14.5 million. However, it had only 3,000 customers at that time. The current funding, Series A, is being raised by the Finnish Company to $40 million. Verdane is leading the funding round and the popular previous investor Northzone is also participating. The company hasn’t disclosed the exact valuation. However, Heikki Vaananen, the CEO of the company, said it was on an upward scale because the company is going towards the $100 million annual run rate.
The retail sales and other things that involve physical interactions with customers, has changed due to the advent of the internet. Now, many new digital screen-based services have emerged that have become competitors to traditional experiences. Many tools measure what customers are doing at certain times.
HappyOrNot is giving the physical world a boost at a crucial time. Vaananen said that the typical use of the service occurs when a retailer decides to cut his staff, to stop getting out of business. They can use these terminals to determine whether they have enough staff and whether they need to balance the staff. Although it is sad, it is better than shutting the business altogether.
Vaananen co-founded the company using his experiences. He used to work as a game designer in Finland. He had bitter experience at a store when he couldn’t find any person to help him with different queries. His friend and co-worker Ville Levaniemi also had the same experience. This got them thinking whether anything, like a company measuring user’s experience, existed. However, to their surprise, it didn’t. Therefore, they decided to form a startup.
The game’s hardware looks like a controller or game console. Moreover, the tablet version of the console promotes the idea of gratification. Vaananen said, “Games are just about user experience. Gamers will only play a certain game if they like it. Otherwise, we suffer from losses. We are using the same idea here. If people didn’t use our services, we would have shut down our business, a long time ago.”
HappyOrNot will use the current funding to add more analytics to its services. Currently, half of the terminals have tablets rather than physical buttons. The decision regarding which to use depends on how fast the clients want to shift the customers. The tablets enable customers to give advanced feedback, like why they are happy or unhappy with the current services.
Janne Holmia, Principal at Verdane, said, “We are looking to help HappyOrNot. We want to see it have major brands as its clients. We possess a varied knowledge as a leading equity investor in software. Couple this with HappyOrNot’s market dominance and the company would be highly successful in the future.”
Marta Sjogren, Partner at Northzone, said in a recent statement, “HappyOrNot is popular across the world due to its presence in airports. However, its growth in retail, travel, lifestyle and healthcare industries is what makes the future exciting. We are quite happy to work with HappyOrNot and it will prove to be a game-changer.”
